


Care

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2018 [21]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Relationship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-05 17:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15868659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: And Tina has the gall to accuse him of downplaying injuries.





	Care

Tina’s limping.  
  
She’s trying to compensate, trying to favor the bad leg without making the injury too obvious, but it’s clear that she’s in pain.  
  
Really, for a woman that criticizes Newt so much for downplaying the injuries he gets from his creatures she’s awfully eager to hide her own. Newt often undersells his injuries because he has a much different standard of measurement for what constitutes as ‘serious’; when one had been on the receiving end of an angry nundu’s fit, getting thrown across an enclosure by a frightened erumpent doesn’t seem quite so terrible at all. Newt has had terrible injuries and managed; he can deal with smaller things that might _seem_ larger to someone else.  
  
Tina, on the other hand, is just stubborn.  
  
“What’s happened?”  
  
“Hm?” Tina looks up at him, away from the mooncalves bouncing around their enclosure.  
  
Newt nods to her leg as he washes his hands. “Your leg. You’re favoring it.”  
  
Tina frowns. “I am not.”  
  
“What’s happened to it?” Newt asks, ignoring the obvious lie. “Did you get into something nasty at work?”  
  
“I can’t tell you that,” Tina says quickly, crossing her arms defensively. “My work is confidential.”  
  
Newt sighs and picks up a small branch that’s fallen from the bowtruckle’s tree. He strolls over to her and lightly pats one of the mooncalves on the head as it hops over to him. “Can you at least tell me if it was a spell, or if you just tripped over something and took a bad fall?”  
  
“Nothing happened,” Tina insists, pouting like she does when Queenie’s reading her mind and getting on her case. Newt wishes she was here, because she’d know immediately what Tina had gotten into and cut through the insistent claims that she was fine.  
  
Or, maybe they’d just start bickering.  
  
“I don’t believe you.”  
  
“Well- tough! Nothing happened, and I’m fine.”  
  
Goodness, but Tina is a terrible liar. Newt calmly takes the branch in his hand and, before she can figure out what he’s up to, gives her a light thwack on the leg about where he suspects her to be injured; Tina yelps and jumps back, wincing and struggling to put weight on the leg. “ _This_ is fine?” Newt asks.  
  
“Damn it, Newt!”  
  
“Did you see a healer?”  
  
“I don’t like hospitals.”  
  
“You don’t need to go to a hospital to see a healer. Don’t they have any stationed at MACUSA?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Well, that seems foolish.” Newt tosses the branch away, and a mooncalf catches it in its mouth. “Let me have a look.”  
  
Tina looks taken aback. “Excuse me?”  
  
“I- I don’t mean it like _that_ ,” Newt says quickly, “I mean, how am I to fix it if I can’t see it?”  
  
She sighs, rolls her eyes, but then hesitantly lifts her pant-leg. Newt cringes at the sight of the violent purple bruising that seems to run all the way up from her ankle; Tina only lifts the fabric to just above her knee, and then makes an uncomfortable noise.  
  
“It goes higher.”  
  
“Erm- I’ll just fix what I can see, then.”  
  
“Doubt you’ll be able to do much. Too much time has passed.” She’s not wrong; healing an injury works best when it’s fresh and the body hasn’t done some of its natural work yet. And from the look of it, this bruising has had a chance to settle into the skin and muscle. Newt does his best, poking his wand at some of the worst areas and trying to alleviate what damage is there, but in the end Tina’s leg still looks pretty bad. “Told you so.”  
  
“Oh, yes, well, forgive me for trying to alleviate your pain, next time I’ll just let you suffer in silence,” Newt says lightly, neatly tucking his wand into his pocket as he stands up. “You really should see a proper healer about that. Maybe they can do more.”  
  
“ _No_ thank you,” Tina says, dropping her pant-leg.  
  
“Whatever you like.”  
  
They stand in silence for a moment; Newt realizes that he’s standing quite a bit closer to Tina than is strictly necessary, and he takes a step back. Her cheeks go pink, and she avoids eye-contact. “Thanks,” She mumbles, looking at her feet. “It does feel a bit better.”  
  
“Yes, well…” Newt fumbles for words for a moment. “Uh, well, for someone who’s not used to being thrown around quite so much, you dealt with the pain rather well.”  
  
“I get thrown around every now and then. Just not by… Whatever that thing is.” She points to the erumpent’s enclosure, where the old girl is currently rolling about in her own filth.  
  
“She’s an erumpent. Though, to be fair, she was already charging when she caught me and threw me, so there was quite a bit more force behind her swing than there would usually be.”  
  
Tina shakes her head. “How do you do this? How do you work with creatures that could kill you on a regular basis?”  
  
Newt looks at her out of the corner of his eye, and then makes a point of reaching out and smoothing a mooncalf’s fur. “Well, after what happened with Grindelwald, I suppose I could ask you the same thing.”  
  
“It’s not the same thing.” He’s still not looking at her, but she sounds cross.  
  
“You’re right: My creatures aren’t malicious.”  
  
There’s a long pause. Newt barely catches her response, muttered under her breath: “Fair enough.” Louder she says, “I should get back to MACUSA.”  
  
“I’d appreciate it if you neglected to mention the baby nifflers. I know Madam Picquery is still a touch peeved about the incident with the necklace.”  
  
“…He _did_ jump down her shirt.”  
  
“Yes, but the babies don’t deserve her wrath.”  
  
“Fair enough,” Tina repeats, louder this time. She starts to walk towards the staircase.  
  
Newt stuffs his hands in his pocket, and then looks at the ground. “If ever you, uh-” She’s stopped, angled her body back towards him. The rest of the words come out in a rush. “If you’re so opposed to seeing real healers, then you could always come back to me if you get hurt again. I can do what I can, and you won’t have to limp around and let it heal on its own.”  
  
Tina blinks at him; her cheeks go a little pink. “Alright. I guess I can do that.”  
  
Newt smiles a little. “Good. That’s good.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
Awkward silence.  
  
“I should go now.”  
  
“See you soon.”  
  
Newt listens to each footstep on the stairs. It’s only when he hears the suitcase close behind her that he sinks into a chair. “Oh Merlin, I’m hopeless,” He whispers, shaking his head and pressing his hands to his face. After a moment he takes them away, and finds Dougal, the wily little niffler, and Pickett and the other bowtruckles staring back at him from their habitats. “I’m sorry, can I help you?”  
  
They all immediately look away, pretending as though they’d never been looking in the first place.  
  
Newt rolls his eyes.  
 _  
Even my creatures think I’m pathetic._  
 __  
Wonderful.  
   
-End


End file.
